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Search Engine Optimisation - Have you been crawled over?

Valentine's Day on 2011 was a little different. I was invited to present a talk on the topic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to a group of students from Tunku Abdul Rahman College (Kuala Lumpur). Here are my slides on the love and hate between a search engine and a website.

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Since the mid 90s...● SEO was introduced in 1997● ALIWEB ● First search engine ● Site ranking depends solely on meta data ● Failed due to meta data abuse; eventually inaccurate site ranking● Larry Page & Sergey Brin introduced PageRank ● Site ranking based on the probability of a site being discovered by a web user through inbound links ● Later enhanced to tackle content and link spamming

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Off-Page Factors● Inbound links! ● Who are linking to your sites? ● Make use of comments in community forums, blogs, etc.● Competition ● What are you competition doing that may affect your ranking?● User defined ranking ● Is your website the favourite among all?● Advertising ● Paid advertising also creates inbound links

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Spiders, Web-bots, Crawlers, etc.● Spiders, web-bots, crawlers, bots ● They are all the same thing ● Computer programmes that browses the internet for website hyperlinks ● Based on complex algorithms for website browsing

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Web Crawling Concept● Visits a list of URLs (seeds)● Identifies hyperlinks on seeds page and add them to the URL queue (crawl frontier)● URLs from the frontier are visited recursively according to a set of policies to identify more hyperlinks● Create copies of visited pages to be indexed by the search engine

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Descriptions● Use description attribute in <meta> tag to summarise page contents ● Place within the <head></head> section ● Description shows up in search results ● Helps users to easily understand page contents ● Use unique description to describe different pages ● Preferably to have less than 150 characters

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The Title Says it All● Use <title> tags to indicate page titles: ● Place it within the <head></head> section ● Each web page should have a unique title ● Title tags are what is shown in search results ● Meaningful page title attracts and helps users in finding your website

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Content is King!● Body contents are where search engines collect and index words seen by web crawlers● Create optimised body contents by: 1.Identifying the gist, objective, and message of your body content 2.Create a list of keywords representing these gist, objectives, and messages. 3.Construct sentences and paragraphs with these keywords● Or, you may hire professional help from an SEO copywriter

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Optimising Content Keywords● Good keywords have low competitions and high probabilities● Low competition keywords: ● Keywords less likely used on other websites similar to yours● High probability keywords: ● Keywords with very high likelihood to be used by users as the search word● Use phrases instead of single words as keywords

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Optimising Image Contents● Web crawlers can see images● Images can be indexed by search engines ● Image file name ● Image description● Use the alt attributes in <img> tags to describe the image ● <img src=”images/seo_book.png” alt=”SEO in a Nutshell” />● Use meaningful file names for images● Image search engine is getting popular and advancing

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Taboos!● Link farming ● A group of websites created merely to contain hyperlinks to each other ● Link farming sites normally generate links using a computer programme ● Affiliate programmes and link exchanges are not considered as link farming● Comment spamming ● Posting of irrelevant comments with hyperlinks in blogs and community forums ● Can be easily prevented by users – Captcha

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Guidelines...● Avoid any Black Hat SEO methods● Put yourself in the users shoes● Consider a wide variety of user experiences● Perform website optimisation for human rather than search engines – its more effective● Submit your website and sitemap to search engines● Paid ranking rarely works and normally avoided by users● Promote your site (URL) in your on-line communities in an ethical manner – good way to generate inbound links● Keep website updated and fresh all the time